Chapter 9 - THE EXECUTION AT THREE HUNDRED METERS
Without another word, Elena spun back toward the light, stepping out onto the sunlit concrete apron of the firing line.
The range was vast, brutal, and silent. A wide expanse of baked yellow clay and dry scrub berms stretched out under the midday sun, battered by an unpredictable, shifting ten-knot crosswind blowing from east to west. At the three-hundred-meter marker, half-concealed behind a low earthen berm, sat three steel "Ivan" silhouette targets, their olive-drab paint sun-bleached and pitted from thousands of modern high-velocity rounds.
Behind her, Colonel Marcus Vance, Lieutenant Rourke, Sergeant Hayes, and the remaining eight operators spilled out onto the concrete apron, their movements silent, their breath held.
Elena did not set up a shooting mat. She did not deploy a sandbag or adjust an electronic wind meter.
She stood upright in the middle of Lane 4, barefoot on the hot concrete after kicking off her boots with two swift motions. She wrapped the old leather sling tightly around her left tricep, locking the tension down until the scarred walnut stock was welded against her ribcage.
She reached into her uniform pocket, pulled out a single, five-round stripper clip of match-grade .308 ammunition, and shoved it down into the open magazine well.
SHHK-CLICK.
Her thumb drove the five heavy brass rounds into the internal box magazine in one clean, downward stroke. She flicked the empty metal clip away, reached back, and released the operating rod handle.
CLANK-CHAMBER.
The heavy steel bolt slammed forward, stripping the first round and locking into the receiver ring with a concussive, mechanical roar that sounded nothing like the light, tinny cycling of the modern plastic rifles on the tables behind them.
Elena raised the weapon.
Her left hand locked into that fifty-year-old carved gouge near the forward swivel. Her elbow tucked tight against her side. Her right cheek dropped onto the wood.
She did not wait. She did not take three minutes to calculate barometric pressure or atmospheric drift.
BANG.
The rifle roared, spitting a foot-long tongue of orange flame and a heavy cloud of gray smoke into the midday heat. The concussive recoil tore through the air, shaking the tin roof of the firing shelter.
Three hundred meters downrange, before the sound of the rifle shot had even finished rolling across the pine ridges:
CLANG.
A sharp, violent metallic ring carried back across the field—a dead-center hit on the first steel silhouette.
BANG.
CLANG.
BANG.
CLANG.
BANG.
CLANG.
BANG.
CLANG.
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Five shots. Four seconds. Bare iron sights. Standing unsupported in a shifting crosswind.
Every single round struck the four-inch center-mass circle of the steel plates, the impacts echoing back like the steady, unforgiving tolling of a church bell.
